


Used To Be

by Jrade



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Catharsis, Closure, Gen, Happy Memories, It's Ana, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Nothing romantic or sexual just a maternal relationship, Or at least "death" but I figured I should tag it, Pain, That's what I meant it to mean, The ampersand means friendship right?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 08:13:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13337079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jrade/pseuds/Jrade
Summary: At her mother's graveside, Fareeha Amari pulls out a coin which her mother once gave her, and thinks back on how she got it. She still hasn't quite come to terms with Ana's death, but sometimes all it takes is a little push.





	Used To Be

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt for today was "This used to be yours". Originally I was going to do something about Widowmaker and Gérard, but i already did that for a different prompt and I wanna mix it up. Keep any given character from getting too beaten up on, y'know?
> 
> Warning: angst and emotional pain, but I'd say it ends happily.

Wind. Sky. Clouds. Light ones, for the most part. The sun shone through easily on days like today, and the whole place was beautiful when it did. Gleaming stones shining in the light, bright white marble amongst smooth and tailored green grass.

They sold it as one of the benefits for the customers, the location, but it was really for the visitors.

It felt wrong, to her. A place like this shouldn’t be beautiful.

“I… still carry this in my wallet…”

Fareeha’s hands didn’t shake in the slightest, firmly tapping the old leather wallet to shake loose the souvenir: an old coin. She couldn’t remember the country, or the name of the airport, she couldn’t remember how old she’d been.

Six, or maybe seven.

The coin glinted in the sun, sitting in her palm - just for a second before she started to rub her thumb in little circles over the centre. She did that a lot, ever since the funeral. The faces of the coin were shinier than they had been, and they were worn down from a million worried moments spent rubbing at them. A hundred thousand memories channeled by the idle movements of her thumb.

She didn’t remember the country, but she remembered the day.

 

\---

 

“Mama, mama!”

A young girls tugs at her mother’s shirt-sleeve - the mother has that look which mothers seem to be so good at wearing, that expression of harried steel. As if they’ve been through hell and back and expect to do the same before lunch, but they leave you no doubt that they’ll succeed.

The nametag on the shoulder of the mother’s long blue coat reads “AMARI” underneath the internationally-recognized symbol of the Overwatch organization. She ignores her daughter’s insistent pleas, speaking with a man in green camouflage.

The airport is busy, people rushing back and forth, but the daughter - Fareeha - is quite used to it. She is used to airports, she is used to travel, she is used to the men in green getting attention before she does. She knows she’s meant to behave and wait her turn.

However, something has her eye. Something shiny with spinning parts and flashing lights and bright colours, and she forgets herself and tugs at her mother’s shirtsleeve again. She knows she mustn’t let go in the airport - she is to hold on at all times.

“Mama, mama!”

“Shh. Quiet, Fareeha - mother is speaking.”

She doesn’t look away from the man she’s talking to, and to the young girl’s credit, she manages to withhold her excitement for a few moments more. She fidgets, a little bit antsy - but then, she is only six years old, so that’s to be expected.

Young Fareeha dedicates her attention wholeheartedly to the machines - rows and rows of them at the airport’s edge, people milling around them, sometimes standing and sometimes sitting. The ones who sit look as if they’ve been there for ages, as if they are as much an installation in the airport as any of the water fountains or vending machines.

Bright lights, cheery music, colours and motion; Fareeha is entranced for several minutes, small fingers staying tightly wound in the fabric of her mother Ana’s coat.

When Ana is done talking with the man, they both salute - the man raises his first, and waits for Ana to drop hers - and then he’s gone. With a slight sigh, Ana Amari crouches to the ground and looks to her daughter for the first time in ten minutes since the ordeal had begun, her face overtaken by a warm smile.

“That was much better. Thank you, Fareeha - now, what is it you wish to say?”

She speaks English around her daughter so that the father and the world can understand; in private, alone, sometimes they slip into comfortable Arabic, but Fareeha’s grasp is fairly rudimentary in comparison. It brings a smile to Ana’s lips to hear her try to describe things, though. Ana worries that by splitting her attention, Fareeha is not progressing in  _ either _ language as quickly as she should.

Ana worries about much, when it comes to her daughter.

“Look, mama,” Fareeha gapes in astonishment, still fixated on the machines for a moment before turning away and grinning to her mother. “Look! They’re so fun! I want to play with them!”

Captain Ana Amari’s eyes were a subject of much rushed and hushed discussion around any base on which she spent any length of time stationed. Quick and sharp, the soldiers and scientists alike half-joked about her ability to see through walls or to see into people’s minds - they half-joked about it. They half  _ believed _ it as well.

Those eyes shot now in an instant to the object of Fareeha’s current affection. Rows upon rows of slot machines, sitting on a false-velvet carpet along one side of this wing of the airport.

Shaking her head, Ana looks back to her daughter. “No, Fareeha. Those are not games.”

“Yes they  _ are!” _ The young girl protests with a whine, stamping a foot and earning a stern look from her mother, but she’s far too excited by the machines to be overly worried about it. “They’re  _ fun _ and I want to play with them! I’m bored and airplane rides are boring. I want to do something fun!”

Ana lets out a breath, slowly, through her nose. The flight has been delayed, and rerouted; it will be two hours longer than they’ve planned before they finally make it home. Fareeha is an energetic child, and while she is generally well-behaved, Ana doesn’t want to make the transit any harder than it needs to be - not for either of them.

She mulls over her options for a moment. It rarely goes well to leap into a situation without thinking it over.

Fareeha knows the face of her mother in thought - the face she is not to interrupt, but it’s also the face that shows up before they go and get ice cream, or before they have a tea party. Or before she’s sent to her room. It’s a face that means waiting, and, in the hope that she will get to play with the games, Fareeha waits.

“Do you know what those machines are?” Ana asks the question without looking over to her daughter, at first, but her eyes soon follow the query and catch a shake of the head. “Those are slot machines. They are not a game of fun, they are a game of chance - and they are not free.”

Fareeha hangs her head in disappointment, scuffing one shoe on the ground; her piggy bank is at home, she has no money, and cannot hope to buy a round of the fun-looking game.

Ana reaches behind her daughters ear with a hint of a smirk, and produces a bright, shiny coin. She knows she’ll need to exchange them when they land, anyway; one fewer coin will be one less to worry about, and she thinks there’s an opportunity to teach a lesson here.

Fareeha’s eyes light up when she sees the coin, and they latch onto her mother’s then, so hopeful, so happy.

“I will give you this,” Ana nods, and Fareeha instantly interrupts her with clapping. Ana’s free hand shoots out and grabs Fareeha’s - not roughly, not harshly, but gently - and returns it to her shirt sleeve. “Don’t let go.”

Fareeha swallows heavily and nods, chastized, but Ana’s finger lifts her trembling chin from the floor and her mother pulls her close.

“Sweetheart…” Ana sighs into Fareeha’s hair, wrapping her up close in an embrace. They are rare, in public. Even rarer in uniform. The whole concept of this all is still bewildering to Ana who never thought she would be a mother, but now that she was, it affected her in ways she could barely comprehend. Her heart feels so exposed since Fareeha came along, and everything that lurks over the girl’s shoulder is a threat she can not afford to ignore.

“I’m only scared that I will lose you,” Ana explains for what must be the fiftieth time. Anywhere in public, Fareeha was to hold her arm, or her shirt sleeve - maintain contact in some way, at all times. “It was not bad,  _ now, _ but you must-”

“I mustn’t let go,” Fareeha mumbles into the crook of Ana’s elbow, shaking her head. “I know, mama. I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Ana smiles, stroking a hand over the back of her daughter’s head. When she breaks their embrace, she takes Fareeha’s hand in hers. It’s better than a coat sleeve, anyway.

“Now, I am going to give you this coin,” she repeats, holding it out where it can glimmer in the sun streaming through the windows, and the flashes of the slot machines as well. “You can take it over there, and put it into the machine, and you might get nothing at all.”

Fareeha’s excitement instantly drops to confusion. “But… I will get to play! That is something. Isn’t it?”

Ana chuckles softly, shaking her head. “No, Fareeha - I told you, those are not games of fun. They are games of  _ chance. _ It is not an arcade game or anything like that - you put in your coin, you press the button, the lights flash, and it tells you whether you have won or lost.”

The frown on the young girl’s face deepens as her confusion does so as well. “How is that playing? That’s not playing. Aren’t there characters? Moves? A game? Dice or a board or something?”

Shaking her head, Ana smiles. “No, none of that. Only flashing lights and music, and coloured pictures. Fruits, usually.”

“I like fruit,” Fareeha shrugs, and Ana can’t stifle a laugh which leaps from her throat. She tousles her daughter’s hair.

“Indeed you do. You also like chocolate, don’t you?” She laughs again as her daughter’s eyes light up, little head nodding hard enough that it seemed liable to fall off.

“Well, you could take that coin, and you could go put it into the machine. You can see the lights flash - and maybe you’ll get five coins out. Chances are better, you will get nothing. Or, you could go and buy yourself a nice chocolate bar, and then you know you will have a chocolate bar. Guaranteed. Now,” she lays a hand gently on Fareeha’s shoulder, “what is it you think you’d like to do, hmm?”

The child looks intensely thoughtful for a moment, studious in the way that only children can be. Scholars of the highest order would be unable to attain the focus of a child trying to decide between fun and chocolate.

Ana can’t help the slight smile that curves her lips at the intense look on Fareeha’s face, and then her daughter’s eyes brighten and she looks over to the machines again, and gasps in delight.

“If the fun part is just the lights and the colours - I can see those already! I don’t even need to put the coin in!”

As Fareeha starts to tug toward the machines, Ana stands with a chuckle, hand-in-hand with her daughter, grinning in the way she only did when Fareeha surprised her. She hadn’t even thought to offer that solution: to let the girl get the fun of a slot machine on somebody else’s dime, so to speak.

“Very clever, Fareeha,” she murmurs softly, squeezing at her daughter’s hand. “Very clever indeed.”

 

\---

 

The coin looked a lot worse than it had that day, years and years ago - a lot worse than it still did when she remembered it. She thought she could still see it, so clearly, as her mother had pulled it out from behind her ear. She thought it had been glowing in that moment.

It didn’t glow now. It glistened, as her tears dropped onto it - onto her thumb to be rubbed into the metal in those same tiny little circles as Fareeha, slowly, sank to her knees.

“I never even bought a stupid chocolate bar,” she whispered to the tombstone, rubbing at the coin as her eyes burned and overflowed with tears, fixated on the name carved into the stone.

Ana Amari.

“I never-” Fareeha’s words ran aground in her throat. Her thumb ceased its little circles and her hand instead clenched a fist around the coin, tight and painful.

She thought she’d gone through this all already. She hadn’t cried at the funeral - she’d stayed, for a very long time, beside the grave. There was no body to bury, the casket empty save for a few trinkets and belongings, and Fareeha had felt no closure in seeing it. No closure in bearing it. No closure in folding the flag, in lowering it into the earth, in watching it covered over.

In standing next to the grave for an hour afterward.

Everyone else had cried, every one of them - sobbed or sniffled or at least had a single solitary tear streak down a cheek. Some of them thought they hid it away and escaped notice, but like mother, like daughter, and Fareeha saw them all.

There wasn’t any closure in that, either. She’d given up hope of that, years ago.

The only problem was, if you didn’t close up the wound properly, it was easily re-opened.

Her other hand - the one not holding a coin - slipped inside of her leather jacket, tugged out a letter from the pocket there. Hand-penned. Looking very familiar. Sickeningly familiar.

“What kind of disgusting  _ fuck _ would-” Fareeha hissed, cheeks streaming.

It had been addressed to her. Written by hand, looking like her mother’s handwriting - as if she hadn’t died. As if she hadn’t been killed on a mission, and for a half of a second after she opened the envelope which had been stamped and re-stamped on some convoluted journey around the globe which had taken who-knows-how-long, Fareeha had even hoped it was true.

“Some bullshit about-” she gasped a breath, forcing herself to breathe; stopping her sentence for a moment to do nothing but breathe and clear the black spots closing in around the edges of her vision. Loosen up her fist where the edge of the coin was starting to jab painfully into her palm.

“I- don’t know who… would fake this. Or why. I don’t-” her jaw clenched up, lips trembling; the stone was blurry now even though it was only a few feet away. “I don’t know what to do about it. S-someone’s pretending to be you? And I don’t- know why they want to hurt me like that, and I don’t-”

She wiped a hand over her face, crumpling - the coin fell from her open hand but she didn’t notice, as it tumbled into the grass. Not at first. She sobbed, at first - for the first time since the funeral.

Not just for the first time, thinking about her mother’s death. For the first time, at all, since she’d laid a hand on the casket as it slipped into the earth - for the first time since she’d frowned down at it in that hole in the fucking ground and thought that she  _ should _ be crying, but had been unable to call it into being. Unable to will her eyes into spilling over. Unable for hours afterward, standing there, looking at the name on the stone and had left with dry cheeks and a scowl.

She was able now.

She wept openly, wailed; she collapsed onto her side, heaving with ragged breaths that came out in whimpers or choked sobs as the sunlight streamed down on her through the wispy clouds. She let out rough cries that leapt from the depths of her chest and left her ribs aching, as the breezes rustled pleasantly through the trees. She turned over face-down and screamed her agony into the beautiful, soft, manicured grass.

It took her a while. All the pain had been accumulating, and it took a while to escape her, but she let it all out into the air and the sky and the ground, and when it was over - when she was done - she saw the coin glinting in the grass.

Fareeha let out a sigh as she picked it up, that little stupid coin from all those years ago, some denomination she couldn’t even read anymore from a country she couldn’t remember, and she pushed herself off of the ground, and rested her back against the tombstone.

“It’s a beautiful cemetery, mama,” she whispered, looking up at the blue sky with half a smile. “I wish you could see it. Maybe…” she sighed again, more heavily this time as she dropped her head until her chin met her chest. “Maybe you can. I don’t know. I just… don’t know.”

Her thumb rubbed idle circles into the coin for another moment longer as Fareeha’s thoughts drifted on the gentle breezes, and then she raised it up to her lips and pressed a kiss to the tear-wettened metal. She knew  _ one _ thing, at least.

“I love you, mama,” she whispered with a smile, a small fresh wave of tears sliding down her cheeks. “I always will.”

One more rough sigh, itself halfway to a sob - but halfway to a laugh as well, as she let her head rest back against the stone.

Maybe there was a point to some beauty in a place like this after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so, I don't know if this was just me, but I teared up three times writing this and also full-on cried twice. It's been an hour, haha, and uh... yeah, it hurt, but it also felt good. I keep crying at the ending, but I think they're happy tears? Not entirely certain, it's a pretty new concept to me still, but anyway!
> 
> Of course, Ana's not really dead, but that's not really important to this story. This is an interpretation, in my mind, of what could have happened in the months or maybe even years following Ana's funeral. I'm going to say that - for what it's worth - this _is_ canonical backstory for my long work Both Sides Now. Both the story about the coins and the slot machines, and the way Fareeha acted at/around the funeral - I might change my mind in future of course, but for now, this counts as BSN backstory.
> 
> Also, re: the slot machine story, I'm stealing that from my wife's family, heh! Her brother wanted to play the slot machines and her dad, thinking he was being real smart, gave the kid a coin and said with a smirk "alright well, you can go buy a chocolate bar right now. Or, you can stick your coin in the machine and probably end up with nothing." Kid goes off. Comes back with a huge grin and a double-handful of coins, dad is gaping. Kid says, "I'm gonna need a bag to carry the rest of it all!" Hehehe; modified for effect here, of course, but I thought it was a really cute kernel of story to include.
> 
> I could ramble a lot about my personal life and my own experiences at funerals, my own experiences being unable to cry for almost a decade and all that happened around there - and I happily _would_ , but I don't want to clog up the space and all, heh, or bother anyone by saying too much about myself. I know some people get bothered by that, haha!
> 
> Anyway, I hope you liked this, and I hope it was the right mix of angsty and hopeful. I do think that, overall, it's a painful but happy story. Probably a bit more of both once Ana reveals herself as still alive, am I right? Hehehe! Hope you have a good day, folks!


End file.
